The Uncollected Stories is not merely an act of publication, but a work of serious and useful scholarship. As the editor explains, it "consists of three kinds of stories: those which William Faulkner published but never reprinted in any of his short-story collections, those which he later revised to become parts of later books, and those which have remained until now unpublished." (p. 221)
It is a useful service to make the stories which were revised for inclusion in later books conveniently available…. For the general reader who knows his Faulkner but has no desire to collate texts, reading these stories is a fascinating experience. Such a reader is not aware of all the minor changes (Blotner mentions major ones, like a different narrator or point of view, in his notes), but is aware of a story that is in a way the one that he already knows, but is, in ways which he cannot always pin down, different in the telling and the effect. An excellent example is "The Hound," which, in thirteen pages, gives the heart of a story of a murder and the difficulties of disposing of the body—a story which has already been built up in the reader's mind in successive layers of rich detail in the novels of the Snopes trilogy….
